Ndiritu Njoka is not one of Kenya’s most favourite men right now, and he knows it.
Because of his work as a male rights activist, he is one of the most controversial characters in the country; and he, too, knows that.
When he chose to become a lone ranger in the fight for gender equity, this time from the trenches on the side of men, he expected that his Maendeleo Ya Wanaume organisation would be the vehicle the male of the species would ride in their millions towards their “emancipation”.
But that did not happen, and Njoka today sits uncomfortably on the thin wall between activism and boorish bluster. His fight for male rights is not gaining the support he desperately needs, and some of the men he says he speaks for have accused him of traditionalist thinking and overwhelming ignorance.
The man, however, remains undeterred; and he is lapping up the attention. His latest decision to call for all men to boycott sex for a week caused a lot of friction among many people, both men and women, with some accusing him of living in his own world. But, on TV and radio interviews, Njoka stuck to his guns grinning sheepishly as he explained his reasoning.
“It’s Biblical to avoid sex if one wants to fast and pray,” he pointed out. “It is also stated in the Koran and other religious books, and those who think that I have lost it don’t know what they are taking about.”
Through Maendeleo Ya Wanaume, Njoka has drafted several Bills, including the Marriage, Anti-gay and Children’s Bills. He is currently drafting another one on dressing, which he says will be tabled in Parliament soon to give guidelines on socially acceptable attire, especially for women.
But, even as he seeks to restrict their freedoms, Njoka still loves the female of the species, so much so that he could not live with only one wife. In an interview with DN2 last week, he said he was a polygamist, and that his women are “scattered” all over Kenya.
The greatest criticism against him, however, is that he seems to be fond of making uneducated demands on gender equity which cannot be used to develop policies, and that maybe all he wants is publicity.
But he disagrees: “Many people think that I am an uneducated fellow who doesn’t know what he is doing, but I’m a trained accountant who knows what it takes to fight for the male child. Our boys have been neglected by the government and civil society and I cannot allow this to continue,” he says.
The accounting qualifications he is talking about are a Certified Public Accountant certification he obtained from Rware College of Accounting in Nyeri.
When he is not fighting for male rights, he says he is an auditor at a private firm based in Nairobi. However, it is not his accounting job that has put him in the limelight, but that of gender activism. As the face — or “the only face”, as some insist — of Maendeleo Ya Wanaume, the 43-year-old says he decided to do something to bring back the stolen dignity of mankind in 2007.
He had witnessed a lot of crimes against men that were downplayed by society and the media while, across the fence, women were making considerable strides in the feminism movement and essentially toppling men from their patriarchal pedestals.
His first major project was the writing of a book — Coup de Grâce, launched at Jeevanjee Gardens in Nairobi last year — in which he outlined the rights of men and called for the halting of the silent march on men by women.
“Neglect of the boy child is giving rise to terrorism, crime and rampant drug abuse as most of the perpetrators of these crimes are young men who have not been empowered or given equal opportunities as the girl child,” he wrote.
“Men are viewed as a cash crop and are appreciated as long as they bring money to the table and they make economic sense, once they stop earning money, they are mistreated and even killed.”
As expected, the book did not earn him any accolades, especially from across the gender divide. Writing in the Daily Nation in November last year, Kei Mutegi argued that “so raw and caustic” was Njoka’s narrative “that one wonders whether this is a work of a maverick or a pathological attention seeker”.
“For starters,” Mutegi continued, “it’s difficult to tell whether this pile of 288 pages is a book or a disparate dustbin of pages bound together by a megalomaniac who loves the sound of his own ideas. Apart from his now famous contempt for women, there’s no other thread that holds the narrative together.”
But the lone general soldiered on, calling for a global movement to agitate for men’s rights because women were increasingly being favoured in legislation, education and employment.
His strategy had the trademark eyebrow raisers, including a scandalous call for all men to boycott any food cooked by women for a day.
In March this year, he took the activism a step further when he broke into a home in Kiambu to rescue a man whom he claimed was being held there by his wife, yet the man was unwell and needed medical care.
The police were called in, and Njoka was arrested and held at the Kiambu Police Station for three days as the police investigated the claims. His case is yet to be determined by the courts.
But, even as he fights on, Njoka has been accused of being a disgrace to the male of the species for failing — as the ultimate head of his home, which he insists all men should be — to take care of his family. He is also accused of having little or no respect for women, including his wives.
However, he says that although he has been married and divorced or separated several times, that does not make him a failure in the family business; and that, wife or no wife, he must still get the respect he deserves as a man.
“I have been married, separated and divorced more than once,” he admits. “I can’t say how many times, but for me this is normal. There is nothing to talk about (regarding that).”
One incident that caught the attention of the nation regarding the man’s marital woes happened in April 2012, when a woman who claimed to be one of Njoka’s many wives woke up one morning and decided to walk out on him.
But this time, she was doing it in style by refunding Njoka’s family everything they had paid her parents as dowry.
Rebecca Njeri argued it was not right for her husband to keep admonishing women in public yet he had been a poor husband who had even physically abused her. But Njoka laughed off the allegations, saying that, if he had abused Njeri, she should have done the right thing and reported him to the police.
“It’s very wrong that when women say they have been violated by men they are not questioned,” he argued, alluding to the notion that domestic violence is generally blamed on the man and rarely, if ever, on the woman.
Njoka insists that thousands of men all over the world are victims of gender-based violence every year, and that their woes are made worse by discriminatory arguments advanced by women’s empowerment movements and prejudiced human rights activists. Since the beginning of this year alone, he says, more than 300 men have been assaulted by women.
His battle for men’s rights, however, is not targeted at women only, but at the government and the Church as well. In May this year, he caused a stir when he announced that he had named his young boy Jesus “to bring the role of (Christ)” in his family.
But not everyone shared his religious views, and even though the name Jesus is common in other countries, especially in Hispanic communities, the Presbyterian Church refused to baptise the child, arguing that the father was mocking God.
Njoka hit the roof, saying the Church was “intimidating” his son. “What is the difference between a Muslim calling his son Mohammed and a Christian calling his Jesus?” he posed.
The sixth edition of the Columbia Encyclopaedia reports that the name Mohammed — also given to Islam’s foremost prophet — is now the world’s most popular name among boys. And, in August this year, Britain’s Daily Mail reported that the most popular boys’ name in England and Wales last year was Mohammad.
If Muslims could name their boys Mohammed, Njoka argued, there was no reason Christians could not name their’s Jesus.
Last week he told us his choice of the name was a celebration of his Christian faith and belief system, and that, even though the church refused to baptise his child, now aged one and half years, he still calls him Jesus.
His fight against the government centres on monies set aside for boy child programmes vis-à-vis the financing of girl-child activities, as well as the Constitutional requirement that Kenya should have women representatives in Parliament.
“Why would a Consitution agitate for women-only representatives in Parliament?” he asks. “In the same vein, why don’t we have seats reserved for men only in the House? The women representatives in Parliament campaigned on a platform of gender equality and equity, but now all they talk about are the rights of the girl child. The boy is completely marginalised.”
“Children are a man’s property and should not stay with their mothers after they have reached the age of two,” he argued, adding that the proposal is outlined in a Bill to be tabled in Parliament soon.
